But Ronny just put his hands to his head, sobbing and whimpering…and then he froze, stood up straight, began walking in a tight circle like a toy soldier, finally dancing in a sprawling, loose-limbed shuffle like a marionette controlled by strings from above.
“He’ll take you now,” Piggy said. “And when you get back, then we’ll discuss your future, pretty pussy. Or the lack of the same.”
15
Silently, Ronny turned away and Kitty followed at a discreet distance, the gun still up and ready. Ronny led her to the stairs and moved up them almost mechanically, each foot placed carefully before the next came down. He waited for her up there, his back to her. Not threatening, not anything really. Just lifeless and dull, an automaton being worked by the unseen hands of Piggy.
She came up behind him slowly, feeling the maleficent blood of the house seeping into her now like a plague, feeding into bone and marrow, nerve ending and muscle fiber…infesting her with its toxins which were positively black and rancid. She could almost feel her soul putrefying.
Upstairs, it was even worse.
It was a puppet graveyard. There was some sort of fine threads like cobweb plaiting the walls. It drooped from the ceiling in filaments and fibers and loose nets. There were things tangled in them, objects that she first thought were the mummified remains of children but they were dolls…no, not just dolls but puppets and vent dummies, some whole and others represented only by stray limbs and dangling baby doll heads, cleaved torsos. They were everywhere in the corridor. It was a jungle of cocooned doll parts. Gray, flaking faces webbed by spiders. Chubby hands speckled with mold. Legs furry with accumulated dust. Heads fixed to the walls in blind, eyeless rows, torsos hanging in clusters. And all of it woven and threaded together like beads sharing a common string by that network of gossamer material, shrouded in fine plaits of the stuff like the bodies of insects in a spider’s lair.
“What? What is all this?” Kitty said, her entire body trembling now.
There had been a barely-suppressed terror right from the first, of course. Just coming to the house was frightening enough…but the longer she had been in there and the deeper she penetrated its nameless mysteries, the more the house gripped her and held her, getting its hands around her throat and its fingers along her spine. And when she saw all those puppet and doll parts hanging in that web—if a web it was—the terror no longer circled her heart like hungry wolves in the darkness, it leaped on her. It rode her and embraced her and flooded her with fright. She could feel it making her belly weak and her limbs numb, the fine hairs at the back of her neck rising like hot wires.
“I said,” she breathed,
“what is this?”
But Ronny did not answer and it was almost as if he were incapable of the same. He just stood there like some blind, mindless mannequin as Kitty made little shrieking sounds as she ducked under the reaching marionette hands and bumped into a clown puppet whose face had been gouged with a knife. Turning, she stumbled into a collection of doll heads and let out her first real scream. Some lacked eyes, others were cracked open, still others were near-melted, their flesh bubbly as if they had been in a fire. The heads swung back and forth around her like Japanese lanterns in a wind. A huge white moth abandoned a doll’s empty eye socket and six or seven leggy black beetles dropped from the straw-dry locks of another into her hair.
She stumbled into Ronny who was no more alive than the things hanging around her, tearing the beetles from her hair and stumbling into the wall, her fingers brushing the numerous slack-jawed puppet heads and she screamed again. For their faces did not feel like thermoformed plastic or carved wood but like warm, living flesh.
Gathering herself, trying to tell herself that she was not lost in the expressionistic tangles of a fever dream, she said, “Show me. Goddammit, show me.”
Ronny paused before a door and backed slowly away into the shadows of the hallway. Strands of web broke against his face, drooping figures and doll anatomy swaying around him. He found a corner and faced into it like a child waiting for a dunce cap.
The door.
It was warped in its frame, the knob dirty and tarnished. Kitty did not know exactly what was behind it, yet she seemed to know very well. There was a hot panic in her belly slowly chewing up her insides, eating her from the inside out and she had all she could do not to scream.
The door opened.
There were no electric lights on in the room, just a candle flickering at a bedside table, throwing greasy shadows along the walls. Kitty looked back to Ronny. He had not moved. He didn’t seem capable of movement. She went into the room and saw that there was a shape on the bed, a shape beneath a graying linen sheet. She watched it, tense inside, watched it some more, her heart hammering painfully.
She stepped over there, taking her time.
Her movement in the room made the candle sputter, its flame leaping and shrinking. The shadows were coiling around her like worms. For not the first time, she sensed what might have been very subtle movement under the sheet…practically nonexistent. Maybe a drawn breath…an arched finger.
Kitty reached out, grasped the edge of the sheet, felt something almost electrical feeding up through her fingertips and gathering in her guts in a buzzing knot. Sucking in a sharp breath, she yanked the sheet free.
And something screamed.
Something jumped.
Something writhed and shuddered and hissed.
Kitty fell back, fear punching into her, but did not go down. Her eyes were showing her things and her lips were mouthing,
no, no, no,
and her mind seemed to close up like a hothouse flower. Because what she saw…it was far worse than anything she could have imagined.
There was not a body under the sheet, there were only
parts
of a body.
A left leg, a right arm, a head. Placed in sequence as if they were awaiting to be sewn to the torso whenever it arrived. The limbs were corpse-limbs, not doll or dummy parts. They were covered in a seamed gray flesh that had torn open in spots, revealing bones and metal armatures. The elbow was fitted with a plastic swivel, as was the knee.
And they should have been dead, but like the head, they were alive.
The leg was jumping and kicking, the arm thrashing and the hand slapping the filthy mattress beneath. The head was whipping from side to side on the pillow. It was Gloria’s head…or had been. Her wheat-colored locks were splayed over the sheets, her jaw hinged, her left eye missing and her right fitted with a glass ball onto which a tiny pinprick pupil had been painted. Part dummy and part corpse and all lunacy.
Kitty saw it all, felt a scream empty itself from her mouth, but it was not a scream, not really. More of a wracked, broken sobbing that rattled up the chimney of her throat, taking everything with it but the instinct to survive.
The head rolled and fixed her with that one lurid ping-pong ball eye. The waxen, lumpy face grinned at her.
“Look upon me, sister,”
the voice said that was not a voice really, but an airless whistling noise, wind blown through a pipe.
“Look upon me, look upon me, look upon me…”
And then those hinged jaws fell wide open and a piercing shriek came out that scraped up Kitty’s spine like a knife blade.
She turned and the door slammed shut.
The .32 was in her hand. She jerked the trigger, bullets punching straight through the cheap-paneled door and Ronny cried out. She thought she heard him fall out there. The door was not locked and she went right through it, tripping over his collapsed form and scrambling free.
All of the doll and puppet parts and bodies were in motion on their strings, swinging and shuddering. The jaws of puppet and vent dolls were opening and closing, glass eyes rolling in sockets.
Kitty heard a sliding, dragging sound.
Something was coming down the hallway:
slap, drag, slap, drag.
She tensed, her hand shaking as it gripped the .32. The inside of her mouth felt like it had been oiled with cooking spray and maybe that was the taste and texture of overwhelming horror.
Something came out of the darkness and it looked like a swollen gray sack inching its way toward her. But it was no sack. It was Gloria’s torso. Its remaining hand would slap the floor, pulling it forward and then repeating the process, the right leg dragging behind it like a vestigial limb.
Piggy was sitting in the hallway, cross-legged. He was grinning as he always grinned, shadows coveting that abominable doll’s face, his eyes bright and yellow and glittering like moonlight on wet pavement.
“You have to understand things, Kitty, because you do want that…don’t you?”
And then he was telling her things, as she wildly debated whether to shoot the dummy or its master or the dragging carcass. He was telling her about graves and tombs, about little boys rotting away in satiny caskets. About their brothers stealing their corpses, taking them into high, secret rooms and using techniques cribbed from moldering notebooks. Fitting little boy corpses with special puppet mechanisms, swivels and pivots and hinges. Stripping away dead flesh and replacing it with wax and plastic artifices. Saying words over those dead little puppet boys and hoping, hoping the words would bring their brothers back to them…and how they did. How they brought something back, but how it was not the soul of a dead little boy, but something else entirely. Something that had been scratching at ethereal barriers for eons, something with hunger, something looking for a home and a body to steal…
But Kitty would not listen.
She put three more bullets into Ronny and he stopped moving. She put one through Piggy’s chest, but it caused him no inconvenience.
“You don’t really think you’re getting out of here alive, now do you?”
And Kitty ran down the hallway away from him, into another room. Because in a room there would be a window you could jump out of. But in that room, the window was boarded and the door slammed shut behind her. There were candles glowing in there, too. And what they revealed was a tiny casket, the sort you might fit a doll into.
And Kitty wasn’t really surprised by that point when the lid swung open and a little girl dummy sat up in there like a Jack-in-the-Box. The little girl was Ronny’s two-year old sister and her face was smooth as porcelain, flaking away to bone in spots and dotted with black mold. It had no eyes. The hinged jaw snapped open and closed and a demented, reedy little girl voice said:
“Baby doll, baby doll, baby doll, baby doll, baby doll…”
It kept repeating this, fleshless arms held out, blackened fingers splayed. It wanted to be scooped up and held.
Kitty supposed she might have screamed.
The candles went out and she emptied her .32 into the darkness, at those places in the room where she could hear something small and rat-like scurrying, crawling, sliding along like a slug. And then teeth bit into her ankle. She cried out and took hold of that hideous little corpse-doll, feeling the flesh coming off in her fingers like sloughed snakeskin. But she held on, yanking its body away and hearing a rending, wet snap, realizing that the head was still biting her. Still hanging on with those little needling milk-teeth and that she had cast the body against the wall, where it had shattered…but refused to die. Screaming then, Kitty pounded that little head with her fists until it began to come apart, until only the jaws held. Then they fell away, clattering like wind-up chattery teeth in the darkness.
Above, in what must have been the attic, there was a rumbling noise. The ceiling shook, dislodging a rain of plaster and dust. Something was up there and it was angry.
Kitty found the door, the little corpse-doll’s remains still clawing away in there, looking for something to hold and lead to those teeth.
Kitty found the knob and fell out into the dimly-lit corridor.
16
The sane thing to do would have been to escape, if escape was even possible by that point.
But Kitty was not leaving.
Despite all the other horrors she had drunk deep of this night, Kitty could only see Gloria. What was left of her. What they had done to her. She would never know the torment Gloria had endured in her final hours and she did not want to know, but she was going to put things right.
Somehow, she had to.
She remembered what Eddie Bose had written:
…burn the McBanes out. Burn that house and let the fire destroy everything inside. It will be a cleansing and a welcome relief for Ronny McBane who has suffered for his sins again and again. A purging. But whatever you do, stay out of the attic. Don’t go up there like I did. Don’t make that fatal mistake.
The attic.
That was the key. That was the beating black heart of this nightmare and this is where she was going to go because this is where the puppeteer was that Bose had mentioned. That was where he must have gone that night that Ronny found him and brought him home. What was up there was the very thing he dared not speak of.